Changing history

Burned into my memory is how we disliked vinyl back when it was the only medium available to us. That’s the history I recall.

It was vinyl’s variability we tired of. Small changes in weather, tracking force, shmutz on the needle, shmutz in the grooves, shmutz in the air, heat-warped grooves, the pressing itself, the slow and inevitable degradation of sound quality from repeated plays, the slow collapse of the cartridge suspension. But those issues paled next to what irked most people: symphonies cut into slices, pops and ticks, noise, getting down to eye level in the hopes of hitting a track, children and phono cartridges, flipping the album over, getting it in and out of the sleeve, scratches, washing machines, Zerostats, tiptoeing across the listening room floor, maintaining the cranky mechanical contraption.

And, when change finally came in the form of repeatable digital medium, its noise free presentation, entire symphonies uninterrupted, hassle-free play, full dynamic range, switch to any track at the touch of a button, I was one of the happiest campers on the planet. So happy I forgave its obvious sonic shortcomings because I knew it was an infant still wobbly on its feet. That over time its benefits would outweigh its downsides and forever bury vinyl. It’s how most of us felt and we happily chucked our collection of plastic.

What surprises me is how history seems to have changed. Most everyone I knew back in the vinyl-only days couldn’t wait to scrap their turntables and retire their collections to the second-hand store or the nostalgia buff. That was the prevailing sentiment at the dawn of CDs until a diehard group of vinyl lovers decided it wasn’t ok. That the sound of digital was so bad it had to be crushed at any cost. My good friend, the late Harry Pearson, was one the ringleaders of this group though he was by no means alone.

The funny thing is how history got rewritten. Many folks today tell the story that vinyl was and always will be the king, that CDs were merely uncomfortable blips in reproduced music history, blips that are now (thankfully) fading. That things were just fine until CDs came along and dethroned and defiled a perfect medium; a medium that today still betters the best of digital.

That history may be true for a few, but I do not believe it’s what really happened. Not in my world, anyway.

I have nothing against vinyl. Nothing at all. In fact, some of the best recordings available are only so on vinyl, an unfortunate fact of a bygone era of great mastering. Like Direct To Disc where it was microphones right to the cutting lathe. Amazing. Without these classics preserved we might never know what good reproduced sound was like.

I am just pointing out how easily history seems to change. How malleable it is.

Let’s not fall into the trap of believing history is the truth. It’s simply the stories people tell.

About Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the co-founder of PS Audio (The 'P' ) and has been designing, building and enjoying high end audio since 1974. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his four sons: Lon, Sean, Scott and Rob. His hobbies include hiking, skiing, cooking, artisan bread baking. His current big project, other than playing with stereos, is writing a book series called the Carbon Chronicles. Book One, the Lost Chronicle, is a work in progress. You can view his efforts at http://www.paulmcgowan.com

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46 COMMENTS

You didn’t mention, Paul, how the recording and mixing console techniques changed offering cheaper processes with low fi sound quality. SACD later became the accepted “audiophile” standard as far as reviewers were right. I remember from the vinyl era most friends copied the vinyls to tapes (R2R or compact cassette) – thus most problems you mentioned were solved. And vinyl records were played wet getting the best quality for the home recording. Thus most of my vinyl records were played only once. Today these records get an ultra sonic cleaning and wearing of the grooves is no issue with modern cartridges or a laser turntable! And what about tweaking CD’s rims with cutting lathes, plastic rings and paint, adding CD mats and cleaning fluids minimising the error correction activities? I still get the best digital sound quality from a CD ripped to my hard disk drives. However I never had checked a CD transport costing more than 12 k$.

SACD (Direct Stream Digital) is the encoding format that combines the best attributes of analog and digital. BUT, pure DSD does not allow any processing whatsoever. No mixing, no mastering – you have to decimate the one bit format to do any math on the signal, so no EQ, no compression, no added reverb. This eliminates 90% of recording engineers’ income.

It also means no mistakes, because you can’t “fix it in the mix”. No overdubs, no splicing, you have to do all the engineering correctly BEFORE the musicians start playing, and they have to play it right from beginning to end. Further, you should adjust the sound physically, with no knobs. This is pretty much a lost knowledge base, how to pick the right room, arrange the musicians so they can hear each other well and capture a perfect blend. It is the digital equivalent to “direct to disk”.

I posit this is the right way to record because: Human Is Better Than Perfect. You set the “soundstage” by physical arrangement, so what you see is what you get. With physical spatialization, you get such greater clarity that the balance is less critical – you have spatial and temporal cues to hear the instruments, so you don’t need to “carve out spectrum”, introduce subtle distortions and mix to 1/4dB like you do in conventional multi-track work to get instruments to “stand out in the mix” – which an euphemism for making every track equally annoying.

I think you’re right Paul, history can change to the false that way in retrospective as it probably did for many. And I also think the history you sketched in retrospective (vinyl was always king in the mind of people) would be very wrong.

I think for a majority, especially of non audiophiles but also audiophiles, the history you suggest really is theirs (people were so happy about the improvements CD’s gave to us from the beginning, so they easily dropped their vinyl habit)

I just also think that the shortcomings of digital, even until the 20xx years have not been as tolerable for every audiophile as they seem to have been for you. I think something was missing for a very long time for quite a group of serious listeners and maybe even some, who didn’t realize it at the time. In retrospective we now see that digital didn’t that much improve in the major strenghts it always had, but especially in those so far occupied by analog playback (while common wisdom and audio press counted digital as superior in sound quality from the beginning).

I think if we honestly look onto the history you sketch, this shouldn’t be suppressed either, even if it’s just visible by retrospective. But maybe this just was the history of very few.

Photography imo made a much quicker and more convincing move from analog to digital in comparison, not only in convenience but also in quality.

Exceptionally high quality recording was possible in 1944, by Decca when they first produced ffrr discs. I have a stunningly good Russian recording from Melodiya in the mid 1950s (the Prokofiev 7 and 9 piano sonatas) Columbia in the early 60s, Decca ffss a few years later, but I think the Germans really got it down to a fine art and they produced large volumes of high quality pressings, such as on the Archiv label. I think the early 1970s were the high spot. DMM came slightly later, developed by Telefunken-Decca and Georg Neumann GmbH, cutting into copper instead of vinyl, and those are magnificent. All those records got looked after. Singles and some other stuff got thrown around the floor. In March 1983 Gramophone published a CD Special Issue and all the professional reviewers had their say. John Borwick’s assessment is set out below, and sums it up well.

I still enjoy vinyl a lot. My records are clean and few have any surface noise. I have many good recordings. Analogue and digital are both capable of totally satisfying quality. To say “the sound of digital was so bad it had to be crushed” is almost childish or driven by some personal agenda.

I can’t ever recall being too concerned about technicalities, as long as the stylus was clean and static low. A wipe with a damp cloth usually worked. I’ve never heard of schmutz, I have heard of schmaltz and hate the stuff. Like everything, it’s a matter of taste.

John Borwick: “On technical grounds, the Compact Disc represents a major advance over the LP record in all the important parameters linearity of frequency response, residual noise, channel separation, speed consistency and distortion, Certainly for the first time we are being offered a music-carrying medium for the home whose sound quality is virtually indistinguishable from that of the studio master. I became convinced of this recently at Decca’s Recording Centre in NW London when I was able ‘to join in a listening session at which several digital master recordings were played in synchronism with their Compact Disc equivalents, My colleagues and I soon had to admit that any sonic differences were so small as to defy consistent identification .

Given that losses in transfer from digital master to Compact Disc have been marvellously reduced, we are left with the inescapable fact that the very clarity of CD reproduction is only too revealing of blemishes in the master recording. Thus pages turning, creaking floorboards and the like are more audible than previously. Therefore extra care is called for at recording sessions. More serious, however, is the clinical exposure of balance faults as when individual instruments are too close to the microphone–or multi-microphone setups create phasing errors or unnatural perspectives, This may oblige recording engineers to re-think their traditional techniques–even if they then need longer sessions to achieve the pure sound quality that now seems necessary,

Just as the messenger is often blamed when he brings unwelcome news, so there has been a tendency to blame digital recording for sonic effects which are in fact caused by the microphones, etc . Previous experience with the launches of LP and stereo suggest that the industry will soon identify and eliminate the causes of the variable quality on some pioneering CD discs. I have, for instance, measured differences in peak level between CD discs of as much as 12dB-so that the potential high-fidelity sound will be fully and consistently realized.”

Could have been your best post ever, if only “contraption” was the last word.
All the rest is superfluous. And at the end you spoil it with some very strange remarks (some of the best recordings….)
But I’ll forgive you that.
Maybe one day the doctors find a cure nostalgia.

Here’s the thing. Some of the best recorded music is available only on vinyl. Jazz CD remasters are, for the majority, dreadful when compared to the original tapes or their vinyl counterparts.

That said, it is truly a shame that is true. It just goes to show that if we had enough mastering engineers that understood leaving the signal untouched is often the best we’d have more of what we all treasure. With vinyl and especially direct to disc vinyl, engineers were forced to leave the signal pure and untouched and go directly to the master.

That’s exactly the point.
Too many with opinions never heard good analog AND digital or have any clue about the mastering differences.

From labels like Bluecoast, 2L, Northstar, Reference Recordings etc. and many good recorded stuff from normal labels we know how good it could be.

For some reason even remasters done by the same guru engineer are superior on vinyl at least if sourced from analog tape (independent of genre as long as there’s no mechanical limitation from vinyl cutting).

But then there’s the new high quality recordings done in hires and provided as hires download or SACD, especially classical repertoire. That’s where digital has a stronger library of media and dynamic as well as mechanical superiority.

So the music and sound quality lover of various genres needs both or has to decide what to drop. I couldn’t live with the loss of either.

Liked CD better then, and digital has only gotten better.
I have a turntable and LPs that I can’t be bothered to use. Why would I:
A properly done needle-drop of an LP is indistinguishable from the LP source when played back on the same equipment – the digital copy has all those “special” sonic qualities that the vinyl adds to the sound. Those pleasant sounding additions are still there in the digital copy.
I’d still rather hear good digital than an LP.

You’re right, such a needle drop covers most of the LP playback (in case that’s preferred). You just still need a record player, as the digital gear alone can just reproduce, but not produce it.

Most say that’s not desired. On the other hand a good part of digital’s improvement was in a direction that came closer to it in such certain aspects (in others it stuck to it’s own advantages for good reason)

It is usually true that a CD-R made from a needle drop sounds better than the same album on a store bought CD.

I am lucky enough to have a TASCAM DSD recorder. I know some people will think I am crazy but I use it to make needle drops in DSD. I recently discovered that I can just put the DSD file on a thumb drive and feed it into my PSA DMP (which, of course, is connected to my PSA DS DAC) and out comes the music sounding so close to the vinyl that you think I am playing the vinyl.

I just hope that Paul gets his music server done in time for me to put a dent in converting my 3500 vinyl album collection to DSD before I am done.

Your memory is quite different to mine Paul.
I never liked CD sound until the mid 90’s. It gave me a headache! I never got rid of my vinyl and my turntable, arm and cartridge date from 1990.
Pleased that I did not follow the herd in the rush to digital. Now I do have the best of both worlds!

So in the 90’s you must have had a great turntable already..mine was not yet that good that I could have said it’s superior generally than CD at the time. As I assume PaulMcG had access to the very best turntables of the time, I wonder that he was convinced of digital so early for other reasons than just getting rid of some vinyl-connected hassle, which I understand. But for sure it’s a question of priorities and annoyance.

As I mentioned in my first post, “my” history was also a bit different, but we probably were two of very few, compared to consumer masses. Even among high end folks we possibly would have been just 30%.

I agree about CD sound. Jumped on the bandwagon with the most expensive Denon player I could afford and the sound was to be blunt, execrable. Various transports and DACs were tried… ARC CDT 1, three Thetas (which all crapped out prematurely) and ARC DACS, finally with Pioneer “Stable Platter” CD player as a transport.

Worked on turntable upgrades from Phillips, to Micro-Sekei, to Oracle, and finally VPI SSM. !n comparison to what I heard elsewhere I had very good, but not great sound. I still have several thousand LPs and listen to vinyl “occasionally”. I worked in the High End, had access to great systems, and liked the vinyl for the ease and naturalness of the sound. In my experience, it was never politically correct, in that world, to admit to liking CD sound; “everybody knows vinyl is and always will be superior”.

Then when my Pioneer transport died, I bought the PS Audio PWT amd PWD combo. I am not a shill, nor do I think I lack in hearing acuity, but that combo made me totally rethink the vinyl vs. CD conundrum.

I am almost embarrassed to admit it, but now I just listen to music without picking the presentation apart or thinking about upgrades! The transparency and dynamics are phenomenal IMHO. I can’t wait to get home in the evening and play some music. I am thankful that Paul has chosen to continue to work in the digital realm and continually refine and improve the sound of CD.

My long-winded point is that I could live quite happily with Red Book CD and PS Audio! Just as with vinyl, there is more information to be extracted from CD than we initially realized. I wonder intellectually, just how much better the DirectStream DAC could be, but am not particularly compelled to find out! (I’d welcome any comments on that topic!)

I very much agree with Paul here. I never enjoyed the fuss surrounding vinyl and when I bought my first CD player, a Phillips CD160 with 4x oversampling in 1986, I was impressed by the clarity of the sound as well as the greater convenience of CD. Unless the recording was not available on CD I never bought a vinyl album again.

I am still very impressed by the technology used for CDs; the laser reader, the clever error correction codes, and I think the choice of sampling rate and bit-depth was a good compromise to give acceptable sound quality and program length on the disc (admittedly bit depth was limited by the DACs available at the time).

In fairness I have never heard, other than briefly at shows, a modern vinyl setup. I have a dark suspicion that they require extreme care and extremely expensive equipment just to chase the performance available from much cheaper digital units. However that remains a suspicion.

Chris, you are probably correct. I’ve heard a Vertere deck that cost about £100,000 and I don’t know what the fuss was about. It seemed to be made of acrylic and rubber bands. A Rega P3 wall-mounted for around £700 would satisfy most people. Mine was made in North Yorkshire by a guy called Pete, they only made about 20, but the engineering is impressive and most importantly it takes two arms, for mono and stereo. It took about an hour to unpack, fit the arms and fully set up. No vinyl guru required. No hassle at all. Get a decent one and it’s a one-off purchase. It will always be more expensive – my Aries Mini streaming DAC server cost £350 and is a complete digital system – but the comparison is both pointless and meaningless. Audiophilia is not about value for money.

I’m not going into the debate of vinyl vs digital. But my personal opinion is that DSD conversion 1x 2x etc has taken my cd collection to a better point then I’ve ever heard. I still love my vinyl, but relax and enjoy the digital for longer periods of time.

I still enjoy both, for different reasons. When it’s just music playing while I’m doing other things, CDs are just fine. When it’s serious listening time, it’s vinyl. Now, if only economy of scale would kick in and make records cheaper….

Boy was your circle of friends different than mine, because few of us minded the journey of getting the vinyl ready to play it on the turntable. All the preparations of cleaning and prepping was well worth it for the end result. Even today because of it my 40 year old LPs are for the most part clean and playable.

For those that didn’t care they just slammed the LP on the table dust and all, turned up their equipment (normally to distortion levels) and rocked on! I have many fond memories of razzing someone over “where is the needle in all this crap” and if it skipped we taped a penny or nickel on the headshell and played the album anyway (their albums of course, mine were never allowed to be subjected to that kind of play back LOL)!

I would oftentimes, on first or second play, record the album onto cassette (Maxell and TDK being my preferred brands) and henceforth play the album from there with its much higher versatility of being able to take the music anywhere. No vinyl bashing from me, it is what it is. I use both and have no real preference, each offers its own level of satisfaction, although streaming and digital have, for pure convenience sake, taken over.

Listening for me goes way beyond the simple absence of clicks and pops. Vinyl is one of my favorite experiences in life.

It starts at the record store. Most people in a record store have smiles on their faces. Many times there is husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend or friends looking together. And by the way, I’m OUT of the house. The smell of a record store is unique in a positive way. I enjoy thumbing through albums. Many times I find new music to listen to, taking a chance on the appearance of the album and/or something I read about the album on the back. It’s always been a half day journey through the store for me, from the time I was a kid. I have something tangible to take home and feel like I actually purchased something. Sitting at home in a vacuum, on a computer, in a virtual store, prelistening to tracks and buying software feels a lot like everything else I have to do in the virtual world these days.

As far as listening goes, I always listen to whole albums. I actually enjoy thumbing through my album collection, cleaning the records, putting the album on the turntable. The couple pops/clicks and bit of groove are actually soothing for some reason rather than irritating. I sit with the album cover or sleeve and read the words to the songs or the storyline in the print. It makes listening to music a unique experience, vs sitting with an iPad browsing music the same way I read news on the internet. That is a flat and boring experience for me, albeit one I still have in my system and listen to frequently.

I actually feel like I’m engaged with MUSIC, not technology, from the time I hit the store to the time I’m in the chair listening. That is what digital kills for me in the process of removing clicks & pops, adding dynamics, blacker backgrounds, etc. It genericizes the whole experience.

I listen to both and agree that the gap has nearly closed. But there is something about the trip to Randy’s Records in Salt Lake (written up in Stereophile a while back) that is well described by Reed’s post for me….

There’s another medium change that shouldn’t be overlooked: 78 to LP, shellac to vinyl if you will.

Many listeners heard LP weaknesses as compared to its older sibling. The biggest loss was dynamic range mostly due to going from a 3 mil groove to 1 mil. (A further reduction came in the LP format change to stereo which ushered in the 0.7 mil groove.) I have a feeling that rotation speed reduction might have further reduced dynamics. And don’t forget that the vast majority of 78 rpm releases were of necessity recorded in the direct-to-disc method that resurged in the late 1970s and had a short audiophile LP heyday.

I have and still play 78s that are sonic blockbusters one of which is Stokowski’s “The Plow That Broke the Plains” on an RCA Red Seal set. For me there’s also the psychological-emotional kick of knowing how much shorter the 78 production stream was, how few steps there are between me and the artists. I even get an extra kick of that sort when listening to very early acoustic recordings like those in which Oliver and Armstrong were pointing their trumpets right at the horn with a cutting stylus at its apex recording musical sounds as directly to disc as ever happened. Sonic quality was very low, personal contact stratospheric.

From the time I was a toddler I loved phonograph records. When I was four years old I was jealous of my uncle who had an automatic record changer. I loved machines, especially those that moved things by themselves like juke boxes and even pinball machines. I loved shopping for records as much as I enjoyed listening to them. They weren’t an exclusive obsession, just one of many things I enjoyed. I gave sound quality no thought at all. A phonograph was a phonograph and live music was live music, two different things. It wasn’t until I heard stereophonic sound for the first time that I became interested in sound quality. I loved it from the first time I heard It. I became an audiophile, a young teen with not much money but I read all of the magazines, went to audio shows, shopped for equipment I couldn’t afford to own, and assembled my first modest sound system while my parents bought an awful stereo radio phonograph console with no stereo separation at all. I think it was my fascination with electronics and my love of phonograph records, tape recorders, and listening to stereo FM that pushed me in the direction of taking up a career in electrical engineering. I thought I’d go into this industry. But that notion changed in my sophomore year in college when I went to an IEEE show and that opened my eyes to the enormous range of possibilities in many industries. Still I was an audiophile, the reviewers were the experts and I knew nothing so I believed what they said just like you probably do or have done in the past. I’m the kind of person who never gets rid of anything. So out of college I was still an audiophile and working at my first job in an immense steel plant I made enough money to buy better equipment still doing what audiophiles do.

It wasn’t until five years later that my epiphany moment ended my life as an audiophile by marrying my love of phonograph records to my knowledge as an engineer with a very strong scientific background. My view of the world changed drastically but I still loved phonograph records.

Years later when I heard my first CD I was impressed with their clarity but once I started shopping for one I realized that they had this awful shrill sound making violins sound like they had steel strings. Around 1989 I found a CD player I liked and I bought it along with a starter collection of about 75 CDs. This was not just a whole new sound, it was a valuable tool, master tape quality with A-B repeat that allowed me to tinker with audio equipment like I never had before because I could compare changes to the same musical passage over and over again with various adjustments. Shopping for and using CDs isn’t nearly as much fun as shopping for phonograph records. Watching the record spin round and round as the tonearm moves up and down, side to side spiraling inward can be hypnotizing. Yet I rarely listen to them anymore. The CDs are just too convenient and to my ears they sound much better on the sound systems I invented for myself, especially the lack of annoying pops, clicks, acoustic feedback, and background noise.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say our PERCEPTION of history has changed. I know when I was a pup, it was bass we were reaching for…. listening the Joe Walsh and Fleetwood Mac. Our viewpoint was moving from transistor radios that had a bottom end limit of 300hz ???

LoL

Then it was silky high end extension listening to Doobie Brothers and the Firebird….

Listening with records was sloppy. You could have many aspects of the system set up wrong and still get a sound that felt good. It could be muffled and thumping… yet it conveyed something that made the listener feel good.

Digital is about precision. It offers a closer look at reality potentially. That requires new disciplines in setting up and a greater awareness of equipment interaction.

So.. some run back to vinyl. They do not want to be bothered when they do not understand the potential that is before them.

My dislike of vinyl as a young pup was primarily based on the limitation of having possibly the worst turntable ever manufactured, coupled with awful speakers, a terribly amplifier, etc. (Anyone remember Soundesign? Commonly sold at Zayre’s? And the quarter on the “headshell”? Yeah – I had that) so my first Sony Discman and headphones were a revelation.

I’ll never forget the concept of experiencing ‘stereo’ when I heard “The Brazilian” by Genesis off Invisible Touch – those cymbals going from ear-to-ear back and forth. The one thing that recommends vinyl to me now that I have a decent setup as an old man is that I am more active when I listen to vinyl. Using the remote control for all of our wonderful digital sources now (Roon and Sonos in my house) puts that damned phone/iPad in my hand and I lack the self-discipline not to check how badly the White Sox are doing at that given moment. With vinyl, I’m far less likely to do that – which I suppose is a feature, not a bug, and why at present I prefer listening to music on vinyl.

As far as “His story” vs history, as a historian myself, you’d be surprised how balanced most of what constitutes “establishment” history is true when you dig back into the contemporaneous sources. The effort to undermine history now as “the story of the winners” exhausts me now and is, in my humble opinion, misguided.

I used to love listening to “The Brazilian ” (on CD). After writing this, I think I’ll get it out and see how it sounds now. Like jbp6061 above, I feel that listening to digital through Paul’s kit is a game changer. Most of my desires to set up a turntable again are now driven by nostalgia.

Those late era instrumental digressions remain some of my favorite Genesis tunes to this day, even when included within the context of a vocal song. Fading Lights still makes me weep. I’m so glad that the archive collections put those out in one accessible location. (While also capturing tasty little truffles like Paperlate and Me and Virgil that got left off the remasters and remixed versions)

Very interesting post though far from the truth. If vinyl is abused as it was by people too lazy to take care of it sound suffered. But if even if a fraction of the abuse that vinyl went through was meted out to digital it would be totally unplayable. I have forty years old vinyl which even today sounds as good as it did forty years ago. All it took was to use a brush before play and keet the stylus clean by couple of brush strokes. As for stylus longevity, they can last for years unless one is ham handed and all thumbs. Even abused vinyl from the days of abuse sound good today. I have bought vinyl from the Salvation Army store just used a brush and have enjoyed them and still do. Why ? simply because they are more musically satisfying than the CDs made of the same performances. Yes I have a lot of CDs which I use for background music. As for Zerostats I bought one years ago but hardly ever used it or felt the need to use it. So all the terribly bad points of vinyl in the post are true to a small extent but the lions share is a figment of imagination. The fact that digital sound has problems is a very significant point as mentioned in the post because the quality of sound is the final arbiter not convenience. As far as sound is concerned vinyl is definitely better sounding closer to the real thing. Take the best digital and take the best vinyl front end and play the same music on both and it will be immediately obvious that the vinyl will be more realistic and musically involving. It will pull you into the performance while digital will be comparatively bleached , less involving and more of an electronic facsimile of the real thing. Just remember the front end has to be the best. This will be quite expensive of course. No three or four hundred dollars cartridge or turntable or tonearm. Try it and find out the truth. Also don’t forget the sound systems of yore were nowhere as god as they were when digital was introduced. Now it’s a level playing field for both and vinyl wins handily. The sale of CDs is significantly down and the sale of vinyl is up not as much as it could be.This is because of music which can be down loaded which is not free all the time and is the laziest way of doing things. Who has the time to listen to millions of songs anyway. Another topic for another day. Regards.

I remember walking into a high end store while I was in the city of Brotherly Love. They had just got the first CD player and were displaying it. The CD player was connected to solid state amplification which was connected to electrostatic speakers. The volume was quite loud. The sound instead of being perfect as claimed was far from it. It was so sharp and edgy it was like having one’s ears being skewered by red hot irons. My reaction was that it really belonged in a medieval torture chamber. As for the late Mr. Pearson. He heard the atrocious sound, recognized for what it was and said so. He was not one to mince words. Digiphiles may not have liked the truth because truth can be bitter. Perfect sound forever has been improved for more than a quarter century This itself indicates how bad it was when introduced. It is quite respectable now but has quite a ways to go. Regards.

What was that place called?? Audio Concepts I think. In Chicago Ridge Mall. I truly can’t blame them though – they were right next door to Chess King and they got their share of butthead traffic. That mall could be like a Pirates of the Caribbean movie “steal all you can, give nothin’ back”. I was similarly unwelcome at Radio Shack back when I was build electronic kits. Damned peers…

I still prefer Vinyl I have an LP12 with AT MC TT and a Creek CD player and I think the LP12 just tops the Creek. I seem to immerse more in the music with vinyl somehow perhaps its the ritual of getting up changing sides cleaning etc and believe me its more often now than the old records I had one Royal Blood LP and I think its about 14 minutes one side. Dont suffer many clicks and pops these days as I use a Project record cleaner or I am just lucky with my ritual

Paul – your every word is absolutely correct. Back in the days of vinyl, people hated vinyl, and audiophiles hated it most of all. You need only read through the contemporary issues of The Absolute Sound or Gordon Holt’s Stereophile. What’s disturbing is how today’s vinyl fanatics deny and re-write history. No wonder Lenin & Stalin were so successful so quickly.

I use a Loricraft PRC4 record cleaner. It’s by far the most important part of my vinyl system. It raises old records from the dead, quietly.
Here’s a factory tour. Paul should use this as an inspiration for his new place.
p.s. Terry O’Sullivan also had the rights to Garrard, he’s just sold out to SME, but will keep working thank heavens.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgSqUxpBRqQ

I was converted to vinyl back when I were but a lad in Edinburgh (Scotland), where the dealer had some high-end Japanese turntables and a Linn Sondek side by side. same arm, same cartridge, different TT.

What a nuisance! A clear and definite preference for the Linn. Head and shoulders, even. Eventually I saved up enough to buy one (from Wilmslow Audio – I’d moved back to England by then). A Hadcock arm and an ADC XLM… Moved to the USA, having upgraded the arm to an RB300, with a Shure V15 du jour. Home built electronics and speakers, natch. Wandered around Target, looking for whatever, and there’s this Philips CD player for $99. That was less in dollars than the Rega had been in pounds. And however bad, it wouldn’t ever damage the disks.

Still have the Linn, and the RB300. Ortofon 2M these days, since Shure gave up. Plays through a PSA Phono Converter, which I use (mostly) to capture the vinyl into digital. (Thanks, Paul). The digital playback has changed a great deal – currently an Oppo universal player – but the analog mechanicals is essentially the same.

And one enormous factor in this is that the cost of truly good vinyl reproduction has mounted way into the stratosphere. Along with other stuff – 10K cables, 100K amps, 200K speakers. Good Lord! Where on earth do people get the money for that stuff?

Right now, a good vinyl sounds excellent. As does a good DSD. And a good CD. I’m sure there’s better, but I like what I hear.

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